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mwengler comments on Open Thread, Feb. 2 - Feb 8, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Posting for the first time because I feel I could maybe use some help. [And yes, I know of the Welcome Thread, but I think the Open Thread gets more attention so I'm posting first here. Maybe later I'll post in the Welcome Thread.]
I come from a very religious family and community, but I'm a closet atheist. (More accurately, I'd label myself agnostic leaning atheist with regard to the existence of one or more intelligent world-designer(s), but I give almost no credence to any religious claims beyond that. In any case, for simplicity I'm just going to refer to myself here as an atheist.)
I have only a single very close friend who knows of my atheism. 5 or 6 other people know I disagree with all the standard religious arguments, but they think that I've opted for "blind faith" and I'm still religious. Most of my family and friends, however, although they know that I'm unusually open-minded and intellectual for my close-minded religious community (and they look at me a bit strangely for that), still think that I'm fully religious.
A bit of background: I started doubting in high school, but it didn't turn into a full-fledged crisis of faith until I was about 18 or 19. Eventually a religious mentor pointed me to Pascal's Wager, and I leaned on that for many years. I got married to a wonderful religious girl and went on to study advanced religious studies. Shortly before the birth of my third child, however, I finally took another critical look at Pascal's Wager. I read numerous scholarly works and articles, went through a bunch of articles on the internet (including several from LessWrong), and did a lot of heavy thinking. In the end I decided that I can't rely any longer on the Wager. For the next few months I forced myself to nonetheless believe by pure force of will (whether this was Belief in Belief or real belief is a different question), but eventually the cognitive dissonance grew too great and I gave up.
The problem is that I can't tell anyone. My wife would probably decide to follow me - but there's a chance she might not, and I love her way too much to risk losing her. Even if she did follow me it would cause her a tremendous amount of mental anguish which I really don't want to impose on her. She'd also likely not be able to keep that kind of secret from her friends and family for too long, and the pain of trying to keeping it secret would likely be even worse for her than it is for me. And if it did get out, then we'd risk losing virtually all of our (close-knit, wonderful, highly supportive) families and friends. And that's besides the terrible emotional effects that a revelation of this sort would have on my parents, kids, siblings, and friends.
I do have a few vague tentative plans for eventually being able to maneuver myself into a position where I can reveal my beliefs without too much of a risk, but that's only for the long term. For the short term I'm stuck with only a single friend who knows my true position.
The problem is that it's so hard! I hate keeping secrets from my wife. I hate having to bottle up my intellectual arguments (particularly because I'm the type whose favorite activity is a good intellectual discussion with friends). I hate having to fake prayers and fake interest in my friends' and family's religious discussions. But what am I to do? I'm stuck with no alternatives.
So what do I want from you, fellow readers of LessWrong? I don't know. Emotional support? Advice? Maybe a link to an organization I could contact (secretly, of course) or to some relevant online resources? Whatever you can think of, I guess. Or maybe I'm just venting my emotions.
ETA: Maybe I should be a bit more specific. My situation closely parallels this. I do not want to end up like that!
Lie.
Maybe you'll lie for the whole rest of your life. Maybe you will lie until your kids are out of the house. Maybe you'll lie for another few weeks or years and then decide the truth is important enough to you that Shulem's story no longer seems worse to you than living with the lie.
People lie all the time, and I think it would be foolish to try to craft a life in which you never lie, or in which you feel horribly guilty about lying. Maybe there is some society in which it makes sense not to lie for everybody, but maybe there isn't, either. Certainly a society such as your own is NOT that society. Your society enforces an appearance of conformity of agreement on certain matters of "fact" which are not obviously matters of fact at all. For you to fall foul of this enforcement is a purely voluntary action on your part. I suppose if there were a magical creature who could read your mind and who would punish you for lying, one might make the case that your best bet would be to tell the truth and take the societal consequences which are less severe than the consequences imposed by the magical creature. In some sense, this is analogous to choosing to one-box in the Newcomb's box problem: rationality means winning. For you to take societal consequences for telling the truth when the truth you are telling is that there is no magical creature reading your mind and enforcing rules about what it must contain, well, that is irrational to the extent that it involves making a choice to lose.
To the extent I can imagine being in your situation, my main concern would be getting my kids out. In my own personal lying, I never lie to my kids except if I think it is for their own good, not mine. Of course, you obviously love your Hasidic life so much that you mgiht believe that lying to your kids to keep them in theirs is for their own good, and far be it from me to tell you you would be wrong. I am very aware that for me, an intelligent physicist engineer, the "cost" of false belief in the supernatural is much higher than it is for the clerk in my department who lives her entire life at her Jehovah's Witness church. She witnessed an atheist discussion between myself and someone else once and sent me fairly naive reasons she should stay in her belief, and I responded, and I meant it, that she should believe if that is what she needed to make her life work.
Honestly, I think your real difference from your peers is not that you found the reasons not to believe, but that you couldn't convince yourself to ignore them! For myself, I give you great credit for being like that, which is small consolation I imagine for risking the loss of your family and your life. I was lucky to come from a family which was already fairly liberal (compared to hasidism anyway) about religion and in which about half of them in my parents' generation leaned towards atheism anyway. I have the luxury of living in a society which barely has the energy to even complain about my atheism, in which my atheism is as vibrant and powerful as their religiosity. If I lived in a society that punished atheism, I would lie about it. I would go only as far as I could go publicly without risking the things I found important. My own version of one-boxing: I do NOT sacrifice myself for abstract beliefs.
Ironically, I will close by suggesting you have faith. Don't be more publicly atheistic now than you can. Chances are if you hide it now that you may find over the coming years your trade-off point moves towards more exposure, more openness. Enjoy your life: we ALL live in medieval mind-controlling societies, the differences are matters of degrees rather than matters of kind. Enjoy the one you are in and make a difference on the margin. In real life, we are not truth-seeking machines, we are life-seeking machines. Our brains evolved to serve our lives, to invert that, and have a life which serves your brain is hardly required, especially once you understand that magical mind-reading controlling creatures probably do not exist.
Mazel Tov, Mike